Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  “Huh?” The bird woman blinked at her, then smiled and glanced down at her poop-streaked self. “Oh. Yes,” she said, “they do that because they love me.”

  SEVEN

  Racquel was just heading out to keep his weekly hair appointment when look out world, here came Sassy like a dumpy comet shooting across the mezzanine, with annunciation in her face. Racquel kept moving, because he didn’t want to be late, but Sassy grabbed him by the peplum to slow him down. “It’s something about ovals,” she declared in egg-shaped tones. “It might not be just your mirror. It could be my fingernail if it was big enough. It could be whatever oval.”

  Damnation, was she still talking about that damn broken mirror? Racquel didn’t understand what she was all excited about, and he didn’t want to. She needed to just get over it, damn it, so he wouldn’t have to think about it anymore and worry whether he needed to see a shrink. More sharply than he intended to, he said, “Sassy, I don’t have time right now. I’m supposed to be getting my hair done.”

  She released his peplum but did not step back. “Where?”

  “Up top.” He tilted his head back in a vague reference to the top of the sixty-seven sunlit vine-draped stories of glassy atrium and the hidden world overhead, where the elevator shafts disappeared, the greenery closed in and the canopy began: the locked suites, the rotating restaurant, and Rapunzel’s salon.

  Sassy demanded, “Does she have an oval mirror?”

  “Maybe.” Racquel didn’t remember. He ran for an elevator, wondering how those women on TV did it so gracefully in heels; it must take years of practice. Sassy, given the advantage of sneakers, kept up with him and followed him in.

  They had the elevator to themselves. Racquel watched the hotel slide away outside the glass, but became aware that Sassy was watching him with an intensity of expression that made her look almost cross-eyed in addition to four-eyed behind her glasses. Racquel remembered a childhood friend who used to do impressions of a hen about to lay an egg; it was the same expression. Sassy was about to ovulate something more.

  “What?” Racquel asked.

  Sassy breathed, “Does she know about you?”

  Instantly, appallingly, Racquel understood exactly what the goofy little woman meant. Hairdressers knew everything. Hairdressers might as well be psychic. Did his hair tech know?

  He had no idea. He felt himself gawking at Sassy. “Christ,” he whispered as the elevator jolted to a halt at the top floor. Then he raised his voice fiercely. “God damn it. Don’t say things like that.”

  He saw her smirk as she followed him off the elevator and across a hushed expanse of moss-green carpet into the skylit salon.

  The Rapunzel was generally acknowledged to be the city’s hair-care acme of luxury and relaxation, although actually the piped-in zephyrs-and-birdsong music made Racquel nervous. But he came here anyway, because these people understood the drop-dead principle. With some satisfaction he watched Sassy’s mouth form an ingenuous O as she took in the ambience: deep velvet sofas and easy chairs instead of a “waiting room,” glass tables bearing cordovan-leather-bound back issues of Vogue, Art Nouveau lily lights, orchid-scented mist fountain in the shape of a golden naiad, life-size Grecian-style statues of Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr. If Sassy was looking for an oval mirror, Racquel reflected, no, there wasn’t any—at least not in this room; there were several salons honeycombed within Rapunzel in order to preserve the privacy of the clientele.

  “Racquel, darling,” the blond receptionist greeted him from behind the French provincial desk. Her rosy blossom of a mouth smiled upon him, but her heather-blue gaze was fixed with consternation upon the potbellied little woman standing there in her dreadful sweat suit, peering through her glasses.

  “That’s Sassy,” Racquel said. “She’s a good friend of mine.” Although right at the moment he was more than a little pissed at her. His mixed feelings made him grin as a thought possessed him. “What you see before you is the world’s most neglected hair,” he confided to the high-maintenance woman at the desk. “Tell you what.” He knew he was never likely to get Sassy to come in here voluntarily again. “Think of her as the ultimate challenge. Take her in hand. See what you can do with her. It’s on me.”

  More surprised than protesting, Sassy found herself seated in the consultation salon, surrounded by bulb-lit Hollywood mirrors and hairdressers—or hair technicians, as they referred to themselves, not to be compared to the gum-cracking hairdressers down in the strip mall. Sassy respected the distinction; this place was certainly not like any beauty shop she had ever been in before. Her Wal-Mart jacket now hung from a filigree coat tree, and she could feel several hands fingering her hair.

  “Oh, dear,” said the woman who had led Sassy back there from the front salon, the one with blond hair rippling down in bangle-decked spiral tresses almost to her knees; Sassy had pegged her as Rapunzel—but wait, there was the sultry-faced black woman with many, many pencil-thin beaded braids flowing clear to her feet. And the pouty brunette, also with long, glorious ringlets. And the redhead—

  “Excuse me, which one of you is Rapunzel?” Sassy asked.

  They laughed like songbirds, and one of them, an elegant black woman, folded her six-foot height to smile into Sassy’s face. “I am,” she said, incongruously, for her hair was cropped close to her classical Egyptian head.

  “You are?”

  “Actually, I’m Romaine.” The woman gave her a stellar grin. “Another kind of lettuce. Close enough.”

  “Your mother named you after lettuce?”

  “Better than if she had called me Chicory Endive.”

  “There’s no Rapunzel,” said the brunette, who seemed impatient to move on to business. “It’s just the salon name.”

  “Oh, dear,” said the blonde again. “Sassy, darling, have you ever in your life used conditioner?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse us a moment.”

  They huddled and whispered. Sassy did not even try to overhear, because she was distracted by the many mirrors, the multiple stolid blue budgies looking back at her and the various flitting birds that belonged to the hair techs; Sassy saw (usually in triplicate) a yellow-billed cuckoo, a puffin, a rose-breasted grosbeak, an indigo bunting, a mynah, a titmouse, and several others she could not identify. She wished she knew what they were, and she wished she could figure out which bird went with which perfectly surfaced woman—which one, for instance, was cuckoo, and which one was a titmouse. But the birds hopped and fluttered so much that it was hard to tell.

  Quite out of the blue, and with a pang made half of anger and half of heartache, Sassy wondered what kind of a bird Frederick might be. A vulture? A bustard? Likely she’d never know. Certainly she wasn’t going to go ask.

  The Egyptian beauty, Romaine, had come back and was speaking to her. “… three-step conditioning treatment,” she was saying, “and then we think a blunt cut, work some of those outgrown layers together to give a more unified fullness you can keep up with just glaze and root lifter. And then, of course, coloring. With your skin tones, we’d suggest something in the warm range …”

  Not blue? Wasn’t she old enough to be a blue-hair? Faced with her cream-and-cobalt mirror budgie, Sassy found herself uninterested in the hair-color samples, bundled like soft paintbrushes, that Romaine was showing her. Pecan, chestnut, hazelnut? Tree-turd colors. How boring. Who wanted to be a nut? And what was the point when all she could see was—okay, that stupid bird in the mirror was a pretty bright blue, but why couldn’t it be a sunny yellow instead? Or something less commonplace? Why not aquamarine, violet, albino, lacewing? Or a rare crested parakeet? Or—why did she have to be a stupid budgie? Why not a crested cockatoo, a fighting cock, a—

  “Is something wrong?” Romaine asked, peering at her.

  “No! No, um, I’m just …” Sassy realized that she wasn’t dealing with this Rapunzel situation very well and it wasn’t going to get any better. Too many choices always confused her thinking. “I�
��m just, um, tired.” Rapidly Sassy considered how best to get herself out of this muddle without hurting Racquel’s feelings. “I’m fine. I, uh, just give me a, whatchacallit, a conditioning treatment or something.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sassy was. Quite sure. As she followed Romaine out of the cubicle, Sassy found her thoughts veering back to fighting cocks and Racquel and his plumage, his cock-tail bustle so admired by all the jungle cocks and ibises and motmots and jacamars and barbets and honeycreepers and bee eaters in the forest of dreams she had lost, so many kinds of birds in the world, so varied their plumage, so much one could be, and why was cocktail the name of a drink anyway? If I had a tail, Sassy thought, what kind would I want? Mockingbird? Macaw? Quetzel? But why limit herself to birds? How about a squirrel tail, a cat tail, a lion’s tail? Why not? A switchy twitchy lion’s tail poking out through her sweatpants, tawny slinky with some piercings, some gaudy gold tail rings, throw in a scrunchie or two? Sure, if people had tails they’d accessorize them. Tail perms, tail jewelry, tail wigs, and tail toupees. Put a ponytail on a pony tail—

  Stop it, Sassy told herself, starting to feel dizzy. If anybody knew, they’d think I was crazy. Tail, indeed; more like a mind skidding out of control, in a tailspin. Ha.

  Ouch. Stop.

  She blinked and forced herself to pay attention to where she was going, with Romaine walking her back toward the spalike room with the sinks in it. Blinking again, Sassy noticed the blond receptionist opening the door of a cubicle to go in, and for a moment Sassy’s mind actually focused, halted by the sight of Racquel in the chair. Racquel as she had never seen him before: Racquel with a plastic apron around his neck to cover his sweetheart bodice and his hair hanging like a wet mop. His face, bereft of its sculpted coif, turned toward Sassy, and for just a flash, despite his lipstick and his glitter-lilac eye shadow, she saw him as a man. He made a good one.

  But that was not what stopped her in her sneakertracks. Okay, she saw Racquel, but at the same time she saw what stood, in a golden Art Nouveau scrollwork frame, beyond him: an oval mirror.

  With a wordless cry she darted into the room, almost knocking over a hair technician or two.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” Wet hair, plastic apron and all, Racquel lunged up from the chair to stop her.

  But Sassy did not stop. She saw nothing in the mirror except Racquel’s big barbaric hornbill looking mad as a wet hen, but she plunged on anyway. Barely noticing Racquel teetering on his heels toward her, barely hearing his shout, she hurtled for the mirror and dived straight in. And when he grabbed at her, off his balance, such was the force of her momentum that she took him with her.

  Motionless, with head thrown back and mouth agape, Sassy watched the brown crow-sized bird dancing on the diagonal trunk of a broken tree. She was not the only watcher; other birds of the same sort clustered on nearby trees, looking on, some of them plain brown—those were the females—and others with yellow plumes flowing down from their flanks; those were the young males. But the plumes of the older males, the dancers, were largest, and lifted, fountaining over their backs in a sunny cloud. Sassy saw now that two of them were dancing—on a sloping branch of the same tree another brown yellow-headed bird waltzed to the same heartbeat music that Sassy could only imagine. The first dancer spread his wings and gave a bugling cry; the second answered it, and both speeded their dance as some of the lesser-plumed watchers joined in, exalting their heads and wings to dance in place as faster, faster, calling back and forth, the two lords of the dance fluttered and spun into a frenzy, then into a sort of swooning trance. Their movements slowed, they shuffled, they abased their heads and wings into a deep bow, their filmy plumes cascading over their heads. Crouching, legs hidden beneath their chests, beaks gasping and gaping, they trembled, their plumes aspiring and catching the sun, perched like shivering blossoms.

  “What the hell?” said a harsh voice.

  “Shhhh!” Sassy shushed Racquel, but it was too late. The plume-flowers folded; the birds took flight.

  Racquel grumped, “What was that?”

  “Some kind of bird of paradise, I think.” Sassy spoke gently, because Racquel had shown himself to be a bit overwrought.

  “Paradise, hell,” Racquel muttered. He’d lost one shoe back in the beauty salon, so he was limping around barefoot and carrying the other one like a weapon; his hair was a sodden mess; and all he wanted was to find his way back to what he called civilization.

  “They called them that because they had no feet,” Sassy said, aware that she was not explaining very well. The European explorers of wherever-it-was had seen stuffed skins first, and the natives had taken off the legs and feet and sewed shut the holes, and the Europeans had thought the so-beautiful birds came from some celestial region where they flew all the time and never needed to perch. Or poop, probably.

  It must have been nice to be so naive, able to believe. Sassy wanted to say so to Racquel, but he was not listening anyway. “Nice feathers,” he said grudgingly as the birds disappeared between the trees. But then he turned on Sassy. “Would you for crying out loud get your saggy butt in motion and help me find the goddamn mirror?”

  “Racquel, it’s no use.” Sassy forgave the insult to her butt, because Racquel was genuinely upset. “Face it,” she told him, keeping her voice soft, “you don’t have a clue where it is.”

  “Well, damn it, if you hadn’t dragged me off the minute we got in—”

  “I thought I saw the parakeet.”

  For a moment she thought he was actually going to rend his garment. Instead, he tore off his plastic apron and threw it on the ground. “FUCK the parakeet!” he cried when he could speak. “May a bird of paradise fly up the parakeet’s nose! I wish I’d never heard of the goddamn parakeet, I wish I’d never seen the goddamn parakeet, I wish the goddamn parakeet never existed!”

  Sassy opened her mouth to say that she wished the same, but realized, with a widening of her eyes, that it was not true.

  “No,” said Racquel in a supreme frenzy of bitterness, “I wish I’d never met you. Chasing a Caro-fucking-lina fucking para-fucking-keet into a madland,” he added, subsiding somewhat, “and I’m eternally screwed.”

  Despite the insults to her person, Sassy felt compunction. He deserved an explanation, she decided, regarding the para-fucking-keet. “Racquel,” she told him, “sit down.”

  “On the goddamn ground?” But he sat, probably because he had worn himself out. Sassy made herself comfortable on the velvety moss and faced him.

  “If I can tell you this,” she said, looking into his eyes, “I can tell you anything.”

  She briefed him, fumbling for words to explain her predicament—a budgie in the mirror instead of herself? How could she expect him to care? It was laughable. Ludicrous. So ridiculous she could not look at him any longer as she spoke. She looked at her own hands, the celestial-blue polish chipping off her fingernails. But she felt him silently listening.

  “Good Lord,” he said, very low, when she had more or less finished.

  She took a long breath of relief because he was not laughing at her.

  “That’s scary,” he said.

  She had not expected such understanding, especially given the mood he was in. He was so wonderful, damn him and his fancy feathers, he made her want to cry. She swallowed hard before she could speak, and she still didn’t dare to look at him, lest she come undone. “All the folklore says that a person’s reflection is the soul,” she said to the ground. “Like, a water spirit might snatch your reflection in a stream and take your soul away. Or in a room where someone died, the soul went into the mirror and you had to cover the mirror or it might take your soul too.”

  “Stop it. You’re giving me the shivers.”

  “But do you believe me?” She still couldn’t believe it.

  “If I wasn’t sitting here, I’d say no, you’re crazy.”

  She nodded. “I felt like I was crazy. Like there was nobody I could tell. I mean, where could
I go for help? You don’t go to your family doctor and say you’re seeing a parakeet in the mirror. He would have put me in the wacky ward.”

  “Sassy,” Racquel said, “look at me.”

  She did; she looked at him, seeing maybe more than he wanted her to. There he sat in that drag-queen dress, and it wasn’t even his best effort, a kind of muted red-orange taffeta-and-illusion thing with only a few lime-green feathers overlying the bustline. He couldn’t compete with the courtship display Sassy had just witnessed. The birds weren’t following him around today.

  He gazed at her levelly. “Sassy,” he said, “I know there’s something about mirrors. I mean, obviously. We’re sitting here. But listen. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re missing your soul, it’s not the parakeet that took it away. It’s that ghoulish ex-husband of yours.”

  Mating season.

  Kleet perched alone, well hidden amid treeplume, and did not sing. At this singproud pairdance time, Kleet felt his loneliness most keenly. It was always with him, for he had no flock and no hometree. There were many birds in the sweetleaf tree-tops, but in all his fledged life he had never seen another parakeet like himself. He remembered no nest, no motherkeet, no parentkeets of any kind. He remembered only flying through the forest and then the sojourn in the strange and wondrous hardair warmworld where there were many good things to eat and much music, songnotes out of strange textured nest-holes—and Deity.

  Deity, his warm walking treebeing. His chest warmed and swelled at the thought, stirring his breastfeathers.

  Yet—still, even after the advent of Deity, he had found no sweetkeet.

  He had encountered no parakeets at all.

  His breast quivered, and he offered to Deity a small chirp: *Please?*

  Surely Deity—surely Deity could not mean him to live the rest of his life alone? Now that he had encountered Deity, surely all would come to him, surely he would find a female to make his life complete, surely she would allow him to touch bills with her and nibble at her headfeathers and display to her his plumage and strut flirt tease step on her tail and—mate with her—